Chương 7 - THIRTY-ONE NAMES
The accountant arrived carrying a slim blue folder. Julian distrusted its thinness. Four years of theft ought to require a roomful of evidence, not forty neatly indexed pages and a spreadsheet. Nora Kim sat across from him and waited until he had finished looking at the first sheet.
"Thirty-one employees," she said. "Housekeepers, drivers, night guards, cleaners, and two maintenance technicians. The amounts vary. The structure doesn't. We have records indicating approximately one million, eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars diverted over four years. That figure may rise."
Julian turned the pages. Each line contained a name, a property, a payroll period, and a number in red. June's total stood at just over forty-four thousand dollars. Marisol's was nearly thirty thousand. One night guard had lost enough to pay for the hearing aids Julian remembered seeing him struggle to purchase. A driver had missed overtime during the same month his wife was hospitalized.
"And nobody came to me," Julian whispered.
Renata held his gaze. "People did try to complain. Their complaints were redirected, dismissed, or turned against them. The question isn't why they failed to find you. The question is why your company made the path impossible."
Nora mapped the transfers. Clearbridge was a shell with a perfectly ordinary public website and a registered office that turned out to be a mail-forwarding service. Its manager, a lawyer who handled hundreds of small companies, had signed formation documents but provided no real services. The actual banking authority rested with Preston and Elaine through layered permissions disguised as operational approvals.
"Elaine received consulting payments," Nora explained, "but we've also found emails she sent objecting to the arrangement during its first year. Two months later, she began authorizing questionable disciplinary actions. We don't know whether Preston threatened her or bought her cooperation. Either way, employees suffered."
"Can we access her messages lawfully?"
"Company records relevant to her job, yes, through counsel and documented preservation. We won't touch personal accounts without proper authority."
Julian appreciated the distinction. Rage had made him dangerously willing to break rules in pursuit of Preston. The workers needed an investigation that would survive scrutiny, not a billionaire's revenge fantasy.
Before noon, Amara Ellis joined the meeting at June's request. She brought Marisol's photographs, June's bank statements, and consent forms from seven additional employees who had agreed to participate. June did not attend. She was in Peoria for Alma's follow-up appointment, and Amara had made it clear the investigation would not require her client to interrupt family obligations whenever management called.
"Here's what my clients want," Amara said. "Immediate correction of current pay, a transparent calculation of back wages, protection from retaliation, and an explanation of why your oversight didn't identify the problem. They also want a voice in whatever replaces the system that robbed them."
Julian wrote each demand down instead of interrupting. "What can we do today?"
"Pay people correctly today. Not after a public announcement and not after a criminal conviction. Your company employed them. Their wages are owed regardless of whether your executives embezzled the funds."
He called the independent financial controller his board had previously approved for emergencies and ordered a new disbursement system established outside Preston's authority. Renata reviewed the order before it went out. The controller began calculating undisputed amounts while the investigative team continued tracing disputed transfers.
Amara also proposed a written timetable that employees could understand without hiring an accountant. Each person would receive an individual statement listing authorized wages, actual deposits, unexplained differences, and any remaining questions. The company could not claim an investigation was transparent while the people harmed were forced to trust another set of inaccessible summaries. Nora agreed and assigned a separate reviewer to check the calculations against raw bank evidence. Julian insisted the reviewers be paid for their work, then caught himself feeling heroic for an elementary decision. The feeling embarrassed him enough to make him quieter during the rest of the meeting.
For three hours, Julian watched the numbers change from losses to obligations his company would actually meet. It felt less triumphant than he'd expected. Money could repair missed rent and delayed treatment. It could not return the weekends June had spent far from her children or the humiliation of Marisol's false dismissal.
That evening, the security officer identified the assistant who had carried the watch box. He agreed to provide a formal statement once company counsel guaranteed that his own supervisor would not be present. The assistant had received a message from Elaine instructing him to move "personal property" to the guest suite and had not known June was scheduled to clean it. The instruction was written on a corporate device. The attempted frame-up was no longer a suspicion.
Julian asked Renata whether they could immediately remove Preston and Elaine. "We have enough to recommend emergency suspension," she said. "But Preston controls access to contracts the company needs tomorrow. If he suspects a confrontation before we secure those systems, he may cause considerable damage."
Julian looked at the clock. In twelve hours, the board would vote on Preston's plan to consolidate payroll authority. Julian requested an emergency executive session before the scheduled vote. Renata arranged independent IT custody over the transaction archive, and the board's outside counsel received copies of the evidence in a protected channel.
Near midnight, his sister Claire arrived at the mansion carrying a bag of takeout and an expression that warned him not to refuse it. They ate at Margaret's breakfast table, surrounded by notebooks and power cords. Claire asked about June's children. He told her Lila wanted to be a veterinarian and Micah was still convinced dinosaurs might be living somewhere undiscovered.
"You know their names now," Claire observed.
Julian nodded. "Knowing them isn't enough."
"No. But it's a start."
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His phone lit up with a missed call from Preston and then a second notification. A companywide email had gone out from Elaine's account. Effective immediately, it announced, all workers were prohibited from sharing wage information with outside parties while an internal compliance review was underway.
Julian opened the message, his anger sharpening into something steadier. The thieves knew the audit was closing in. They were trying to frighten thirty-one people into silence before the truth reached the board.
